Conor McGregor is not going to become President of Ireland. The question of whether he should become President of Ireland is, therefore, moot. But he has some support, nevertheless, including from some people who are my readers, even if they should know better.
Why he has support is not hard to fathom: He says what a section of the population thinks. He says that the political class in Ireland is crooked and useless. He says that the Irish people need patriotic leadership. He speaks out in the plain language of the street about crime and immigration. He reflects back, like a mirror, a disdain at the political establishment that his supporters feel is directed at them by the political establishment. He is the “fuck you” candidate.
If you wanted someone to encapsulate in one person the phrase “a middle finger to the establishment”, it would be hard to improve on McGregor. He disgusts them, in RTE and Leinster House and the law library (at least those members of the law library not on his payroll). That’s the point. Vote for him to annoy them.
There’s room in Ireland for a “fuck you” candidate: Somebody who embodies the pure psyche of the anti-establishment voter and represents a desire to tear down the political establishment and – in the language of Brexit – “take back control” of the country and the narrative.
But McGregor’s not the guy.
There are those who see in him a kind of Irish version of Donald Trump, and like him for it. The problem, and this is where I must be blunt, is that Conor McGregor is no Donald Trump.
Yesterday in County Kerry, the County Council sat patiently and listened to fourteen candidates set out their pitch for the Presidency. Of those fourteen, only three could be considered remotely serious or credible candidates: In order of their appearance, Nick Delehanty, Gareth Sheridan, and Maria Steen. Eleven other people, some of them surely good people but none of them with any convincing claim to being able to mount a serious tilt at the Presidency, showed up and made a pitch.
Conor McGregor did not show up. This is the functional equivalent of Donald Trump deciding not to contest the Iowa caucuses or show up for the New Hampshire primary.
I’m not going to write here about the Nikita Hand case – I wrote about it at the time – but the bottom line on that one is that even if you believe every single word McGregor has said about it, his behaviour was not that of a good dude. I’m not going to talk at length about him punching an older man in a pub (to be honest I find the automatic assignation of virtue to old people a bit annoying). I’m not going to elaborate on why it might put some people off to have a President of Ireland who has pictures of himself on the internet lifting miniature weights with his penis – pictures he apparently sends to women as an enticement to sex with him.
No, none of those things really matter, fatal to his candidacy though they would be in any circumstance.
What matters is this: If you are going into battle, it is helpful to go into battle with a competent general. One who knows the battlefield. One who understands the fight. One who knows the enemy’s tactics and has thought about how to counter them.
Conor McGregor is not a competent general. His campaign (or whatever it is) has been based on the idea that if you can get enough Americans to tweet that you should be President, the Irish voter might agree. It has been a campaign that seems to think that the endorsement of Elon Musk matters more than actually going to Kerry and asking Councillors for their nomination. The entire pitch has essentially been that the Irish people should support him because people on the American internet support him – and McGregor shouldn’t have to lower himself to going to Kerry and actually meeting any potential supporters, or answering questions from his potential subjects.
Meanwhile, he has indulged in a bizarre fantasy politics: Endless tweets about how he would direct that this or that be done as President, or how he would tell the Government what to do. The problem with this is simply that most of the country did a leaving cert and has a base level of education about the role of the President: If you are taken in by this stuff, therefore, you reveal yourself as sub-optimally educated. McGregor might as well tweet, on a daily basis, “my supporters are thickos who don’t know anything about their own country”.
This is the problem: When you make yourself the candidate of thickos who don’t understand what the President can even do, it means that anyone else who might vote for you has to nearly self-identify as a thicko to justify it. Good candidates make their supporters feel smart for voting for them. Bad ones openly advertise themselves as clueless.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think McGregor is remotely clueless. I think – and have thought all along – that this “campaign” is much more about Brand McGregor in the United States than it is about Ireland at all. What better way to protect one’s image and reputation after multiple credible claims of sexual misconduct than to run for President and say that the smears against you are just the same as the ones levelled at Trump? “I was such a threat they had to lie to stop me” is an explanation that a MAGA American audience just might buy. Even if Irish voters do not.
If he really wanted to be President, he’d have been in Kerry yesterday. But he wasn’t. He was yucking it up on Social Media with Elon Musk. That tells you all you need to know.